Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel

In this pensive outing, Mulloy (As Little As Nothing) reflects on the history and merits of train travel. Writing of artists and wanderlust, Mulloy notes that train journeys allowed Austrian writer Stephan Zweig (1881-1942) the space “to write, to think, to break free from the ties and habits of his life” and discover the world “that lives within.” Mulloy herself experiences a paradoxical “stillness” when traveling by train that allows “creative thought to flourish.” Elsewhere, she delves into history of the railroad in the United States, contending that trains sometimes served as sites of class conflicts. Following the 1864 invention of the Pullman car, for example, wealthy passengers enjoyed compartments with private sleeping berths and washrooms, where they were tended to by severely underpaid and mistreated Black porters. (In 1924, those men formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, negotiated for “better pay and working conditions,” and became “one of the core underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement.”) Though Mulloy’s wistful prose occasionally slips into sentimentality (she repeatedly muses on how a writer’s real journey is internal and ongoing), recollections of her own train trips are often poignant and vivid, as in a discussion of a yearly trek she takes with her daughter that “allow[s] me to see her out of her element.” Readers will be persuaded that traveling can be more than a means for getting from point A to point B. (Apr.)